newsletter
This past week I had the opportunity to officially launch a new publication project as part of the Evanston Environmental Justice Coalition. I'm pulling together a team of folks to publish the first edition of what we hope to be a biannual publication on the state of environmental
Environmental equity
On July 14, I officially opened a project for the Evanston Environmental Justice Coalition: Producing the first edition of a new biannual publication on the state of environmental justice in Evanston. The start-up edition project will take 3 months beginning in September. The publication I envision should have voice
Community listening
When I started this journey I defined community listening as three elements; * How a group facilitates listening to the community members it serves. * How a group helps community members make sense of what it is learning. * How a group facilitates co-creating solutions with the community members it serves. One
My professional background integrates learning, knowledge-sharing, design, and change. Much of the work centered on listening to folks who experience the impact of solutions designed to address workplace challenges. Then learning how to design better solutions with them, rather than for them. In 2025 I began exploring community listening
Note: This is a long post - much longer than I usually write. But it lays out the full current state of the work I am doing, and how I think about community listening, co-creating local solutions, and learning what those activities mean for environmental equity in my home city.
I'm sitting here today contributing work on several things with the environmental justice folks in Evanston: A grant application, comments on a draft report from the Evanston Environmental Equity Investigation, and communications plans with a subcommittee team of a new coalition. It's a long way from
This is my updated effort to craft an overview of environmental justice - what it is, what it means in Evanston, and potential paths for the future. What do we mean by environmental justice? Environmental justice recognizes that our history of racial discrimination leads to current and on-going environmental, health
Monthly newsletter: Exploring community listening work and environmental equity in Evanston, IL.
Build community connections and power. Grow more trees, plants and food. Nurture parks and open spaces. Make transit options green, safe and accessible. Invest in affordable, sustainable housing. Eliminate man-made environmental hazards. Reduce waste, increase reuse and sharing. Design severe weather safeguards. These draft statements are designed to define
When I first started exploring community listening, I worked at defining what it means. To me. And while I keep adding nuance to the language I use, it basically boils down to three things. How we listen with other people, how we make sense of what we are all hearing,
A few things I just want to get into writing. Variation on thinking about thinking tasks. This came in conversation with Tom Mulhern (a co-conspirator) about a very draft design of a one-hour facilitated session to engage small neighborhood groups in conversation about potential environmental equity actions. The
This is thinking-out-loud about work-in-progress. The context is my effort to help design a local environmental justice curriculum. "Curriculum" in a very loose sense. What I am working on is a set of learning activities that are connected, but not scripted. Sort of a
When we think about how we listen to folks who live in our communities, we likely think about meetings. Special community meetings. Or projects that include community engagement meetings as one step in a larger project plan. But projects and stand-alone meetings have flaws. They are designed and facilitated
One of the bits of wisdom I learned as an educator was to think about the design of a course as guided by a kind of story. The basic arc of the story in my case always started by first defining a big, complex challenge, then exploring some ideas, each
Let's start with a fictional account about a real meeting to illustrate thinking about thinking tasks in the design of community listening activities. You live in a close-knit neighborhood and recently felt a nudge to learn more about local efforts that impact climate change. Your 3rd grade
My professional background integrates learning, knowledge-sharing, design, and change. Much of the work centered on listening to folks who experience the impact of solutions designed to address workplace challenges. Then learning how to design better solutions with them, rather than for them. In 2025 I began exploring community listening
Note: This is a long post - much longer than I usually write. But it lays out the full current state of the work I am doing, and how I think about community listening, co-creating local solutions, and learning what those activities mean for environmental equity in my home city.
I've been reflecting a bit on moments that move, that create a shift. It's challenging to identify those moments in real time. Only looking back do you recognize the shift. Which means: If you wish to make change, you probably need to create a lot of
The end game for this curriculum: Folks have the power and resources to invent their own ways to create healthy neighborhood communities. I started thinking about this curriculum as involving two types of folks: Those who live in the neighborhoods impacted by historical injustice and environmental inequities. And those who
I recently started reading Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (science fiction is now my favorite holiday from current news and events). A moment in the story stood out. Genly Ai is a human envoy sent out to convince another human world to join an
